made for a grand assault. A French engineer,
Chevalier d'Arcon, had invented some enormous floating batteries,
fire-proof, as he believed; a hundred and fifty pieces of cannon were to
batter the place all at once, near enough to facilitate the assault. On
the 13th of September, at 9 A. M., the Spaniards opened fire: all the
artillery in the fort replied at once; the surrounding mountains repeated
the cannonade; the whole army covered the shore awaiting with anxiety the
result of the enterprise. Already the fortifications seemed to be
beginning to totter; the batteries had been firing for five hours; all at
once the Prince of Nassau, who commanded a detachment, thought he
perceived flames mastering his heavy vessel; the fire spread rapidly; one
after another, the floating batteries found themselves disarmed. "At
seven o'clock we had lost all hope," said an Italian officer who had
taken part in the assault; "we fired no more, and our signals of distress
remained unnoticed. The red-hot shot of the besieged rained down upon
us; the crews were threatened from every point." Timidly and by weak
detachments, the boats of the two fleets crept up under cover of the
batteries in hopes of saving some of the poor creatures that were like to
perish; the flames which burst out on board the doomed ships served to
guide the fire of the English as surely as in broad daylight. At the
head of a small squadron of gunboats Captain Curtis barred the passage of
the salvors; the conflagration became general, only the discharges from
the fort replied to the hissing of the flames and to the Spaniard's cries
of despair. The fire at last slackened; the English gunboats changed
their part; at the peril of their lives the brave seamen on board of them
approached the burning ships, trying to save the unfortunate crews; four
hundred men owed their preservation to those efforts. A month after this
disastrous affair, Lord Howe, favored by the accidents of wind and
weather, revictualled for the third time, and almost without any
fighting, the fortress and the town under the very eyes of the allied
fleets. Gibraltar remained impregnable.

Peace was at hand, however: all the belligerents were tired of the
strife; the Marquis of Rockingham was dead; his ministry, after being
broken up, had re-formed with less lustre under the leadership of Lord
Shelburne. William Pitt, Lord Chatham's second son, at that time
twenty-two years of age, had a seat in